A model of your brain may one day be grown in a lab, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Brain organoids, collections of cells found in the brain, have been grown from blood samples of people with Alzheimer’s disease and used to assess the impact of a drug called escitalopram in a new study. Vasiliki Machairaki, study leader and a genetic medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, have shown that such an approach may have wide-ranging implications.

Machairaki: It's all about precision medicine. At the drug clinics if you are able to make the organoids from each patient and that you have in it the lab you can test a variety of drugs and see  which drug they can respond or which those or when and you are trying to find a new drug see if you can slow down this is actually eliminate the disease so this is the major focus and the goal.     :25

Analyzing proteins from the organoids and looking at what the cells dispose of via structures called extracellular vesicles have also revealed new insights into differences between those who have Alzheimer’s disease and those who do not, and may point toward more effective treatments. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.